Bring the crane game home

Everyone’s familiar with the quarter gobbling crane games. More often than not there’s a child nearby begging a parent for more quarters so they can try their hand at the toy-snatching claw. [Marc.Cryan] put his quarters to a better use by building a home version of the crane game.

[Marc] installed a gantry in an archway of his house.Â The crane trolley rides on this gantry and uses a spool to raise or lower the tether for the claw. Winning copious style-points, he used the case of an old mouse to form the claw. An Arduino controls the different motors in the system and a toy was repurposed to act as the controller. As you can see after the break, it’s more fun than the cinema-lobby version of the game and your kids can play with it for free.

Heck yeah run that badboy all around the house like kitchen bedroom and on the crane put a cam and on the hand held control put a display so you know where the claw is you never have to leave your sofa

Actually, the real thing is set to only grab properly every five times or so.
All of the other attempts, it only grabs halfway shut and then loses most of its pneumatic strength, so catching anything is virtually impossible.
(heard from a guy that works at a company repairing the machines)

For the kids? Hell, my wife is addicted to these things (though fortunately there aren’t that many of them around otherwise we’d bleed quarters).

For her it’s not much about the winning of cute little fuzzy animals (or whatever), it’s about actually beating the machine and winning anything at all. I think she just enjoys getting stuff out of these things when they’re so clearly designed to rip people off.

I think this project might be interesting to be done in 2-D. Maybe use the track designed for track lighting? Then one just needs to teach the thing how to open a refrigerator door and grab a beverage to return to the operator. There must be some law of physics which would describe perfectly why seemingly all technological devices end up tending toward beer retrieval.

“As technical complexity of a given invention approaches infinity, the likelihood that someone will think ‘hey, that thing might be able to bring me a beer’ approaches 1.”

No what it really needs is to have magnets on a track in the ceiling and supply power to the claw via witricity and then the claw just rolls around on the ceiling and picks up all of your stuff for you xD

Okay, why any processor to operate this? A simple old two fire button digital joystick could actuate relays and make it go up and down, and use one fire button to open the claw, another to close. If you added another axis, two joysticks. Now if you want to control it wirelessly, then yeah, a processor, but this setup it a bit overkill (a word and observation that I know is overused on this site)

First off it’s way easier, with the claws not sucking (he’s using a mouse shell instead of 3 metal wire fingers), and he has control of when to grab and let go, and when to lower and raise and can stop at any point, also it only moves left and right and not forward and back.

A real claw has a time limit, you move it where you want it to go, you press one button (or wait for the time to expire) and it drops and it grabs when it wants to grab, you don’t get two tries to grab with one drop, and you don’t get to readjust if you’re a little off — you lose your WHOLE position every time because it automatically moves to the drop shoot to drop whatever you didn’t grab.